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by smallworld
4059 days ago
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I work in a lab that directly competes with Barabási. Barabási is seen as a mortal enemy and we try to discredit his work as often as possible, just as this article does. But the truth is, the whole field is pretty much nonsense. We try to apply network theory in a way which doesn't really apply. We make assumptions about biology that are trivially false. Any statistical results that reach significance fail to be significant on retesting. Any results which continue to be significant do not match the experimental data. This field has not yet proven anything of true biological value. |
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One time I had worked for about a year on some non-trivial enumerative calculations of pathways and flow patterns within metabolic networks. I was due to present these results, pre-publication, as a large multi-departmental talk. The night before the talk I was preparing some visuals and I noticed some oddness in the subnetworks. Upon further investigation I realized I had a bug in my code that reversed a significant number of edges. My conclusions were completely blown and redoing the calculations would take a week at minimum and I couldn't be sure that I would see the same phenomenon in the corrected network. My advisor told me to present that day anyway with mocked visuals and that I would probably get the same result with the real data. I refused on principle but that had repercussions.
Biologists as a whole don't have the best mathematical education and they seem to only appreciate math when it confirms their theories.